The Arts >>

• Personal Best (1 Comment)
  Richard J. Simon
  Richard J. Simon, artistic director for Plantation's much-lauded Mosaic Theatre, seemed doomed to a life of greasepaint and footlights from the day he was shipped off to summer camp in Pennsylvania as a tot. He starred there in Oliver and Pippin and got utterly hooked on the sheer showbizzery of... More >>
• Best Museum
  The Flagler Museum
  Even in the café at the Flagler Museum, you'll learn something, like how the teabag came to be. (New York vendor Thomas Sullivan put samples of tea in silk bags and sent them to his customers in 1908.) And from Thanksgiving to the end of March, you can feast on a traditional Gilded Age... More >>
• Best Art Museum
  Museum of Art
  Drawing South Floridians away from the beach and into a museum has always been a challenge, but the Museum of Art of Fort Lauderdale has it all figured out. Exhibits like "Diana: A Celebration" and "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" have packed the 21,000-plus-square-foot building... More >>
• Best Museum Curator
  Tom Gregerson The Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens
  The Morikami's gardens have been stunning visitors for years, many of whom never knew that South Florida had much of a history at all, let alone one that includes a significant pre-World War II Japanese population. Curator Tom Gregerson makes it his business to keep that history — as well... More >>
• Best Solo Art Exhibition
  "James McNeill Whistler: Selected Works From the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland" Boca Raton Museum of Art
  Poor James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He's destined for eternity to be famous for Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Painter's Mother — better known as Whistler's Mother, one of the most famous paintings of the 19th Century. Whether by choice or necessity, the Boca Museum's... More >>
• Best Group Art Exhibition
  "Before the Camera: Remaking Reality and the Make-believe" The Norton Museum of Art
  Leave it to the Norton to take on the challenge of making us rethink the medium of photography and its aesthetic possibilities. The most democratic of all media — who doesn't have a camera these days? — has also become perhaps the most suspect, thanks to the computer's ability to... More >>
• Best Visual Artist
  Purvis Young
  At some unidentifiable point along the way, Purvis Young went from being a street person in Miami's Overtown neighborhood to being a South Florida cultural institution. Last year, that metamorphosis was confirmed by a happy coincidence: a sweeping retrospective of the artist's career at the Boca... More >>
• Best Art Gallery to Leave Palm Beach County in the Past Year
  Lurie Fine Art Galleries
  Wouldn't you know it: Just when a first-class gallery with an emphasis on Latin American art seemed to be firmly established outside Miami's orbit, the gallery in question gets sucked into that very orbit. We're talking Lurie Fine Art Galleries, which was previously one of the eight galleries... More >>
• Best Exhibition Title
  "Malcolm Morley: The Art of Painting" Museum of Contemporary Art Joan Lehman Bldg.
  Sometimes simpler is better. Way better. Whoever came up with the title for MoCA's dazzling career retrospective of the work of Morley, the British-born artist who settled in the States in the late '50s and became a citizen in 1990, not only hit the nail on the head but hammered it flush with... More >>
• Best Movie Theater
  Cinema Paradiso
  Cinema Paradiso used to be a church, and it still feels like one. With its stained-glass windows and its stature as home of the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, it's a place that draws passionate people to worship celluloid idols. Even better than the theater's cushy plush seats and... More >>
• Best Live Band
  Marijah and the Reggae All-Stars
  Sure, indie rock rules the scene, and a ton of imitation bands are cropping up all over South Florida (with matching hair, trying to become the next Fall Out Boy). But that doesn't mean that any of these cookie-cutter groups actually knows how to play. Locally, the band with the strongest... More >>
• Best Rock Vocalist
  Nic DiPace of Wilderness of Tekoa
  Can a Christian singer really rock? How can a vocalist be powerful and edgy while belting out lyrics like "Oh who am I, this breath of fading mist?/Where do I stand on this speck of heaven's dust?" Nic DiPace somehow balances Christ-like humility with a powerful and expansive voice. He lends... More >>
• Best Hip-hop Vocalist (8 Comments)
  Butta Verses
  As far as hip-hopping and b-boying in Broward County is concerned, there's nobody else with the lyrical dexterity or the street clout of Fort Lauderdale's Butta Verses. He's a member of the De La Soul family and soaked in a lot of exposure touring with them, but he's still got his own rhyming... More >>
• Best Local Album (3 Comments)
  The Postmarks
  More than two years of fine-tuning and detail work went into creating this slice of mopey melancholy, and the results speak for themselves. Charting overseas and winning plenty of domestic college-radio airplay upon its February 2007 release, The Postmarks bore as much resemblance to a lowly... More >>
• Best MusicVenue (1 Comment)
  Club Cinema
  Our inaccessible geography aside, one major reason bands have forsaken us is our preponderance of pathetic venues with nasty bathrooms, bad sound, no parking, and just a general all-around malaise. Part of the problem is that few live music venues were designed as such — believe it or not,... More >>
• Best Band to Break Up in the Past 12 Months
  Die Stinkin'
  This punk-rock band's members ranged in age from "barely old enough to drink" to "nearing retirement," but they all had a natural don't-give-a-fuck attitude that reminded you of your favorite group of high school misfits who just got a license but couldn't afford a car. So when they broke up... More >>
• Best Metal Band (1 Comment)
  Torche
  Modern metal is the new indie rock, let's just get that straight. Everyone has now officially traded in his Clairol black hair dye for a long, flowy metal mane. And despite this flooded market of mediocre metal, Fort Lauderdale is able to boast a band that was there all along, developing its... More >>
• Best Theatrical Production
  The Faith Healer Inside Out Theatre
  It's not easy to draw out a moment of suspense — those instants when it's certain that something revelatory or horrifying is about to happen. In The Faith Healer, such a moment was drawn out for two hours. Barely a story, The Faith Healer, by playwright Brian Friel, is comprised of four... More >>
• Best Director
  Kim St. Leon for The Faith Healer at Inside Out Theatre
  Good directing is like alchemy: It is the trick of taking disparate, unknown elements and fusing them into a whole that not only makes sense but equals more than the sum of its parts. Kim St. Leon did this as well as it's ever been done with Inside Out Theatre's production of The Faith Healer.... More >>
• Best Actor
  Paul Tei in Glengarry Glen Ross at the Mosaic Theatre
  If you saw Glengarry's original production or the 1992 film adaptation, you inevitably compared Paul Tei's fast-talking, gel-haired Ricky Roma to the interpretations by a young Joe Mantegna or middle-period Al Pacino. Miraculously, in spite of this heavyweight company, Tei suffered not at all... More >>
• Best Actress
  Pat Nesbit in The Lion in Winter at the Caldwell Theatre
  Taking on the role of Eleanor of Aquitaine in Caldwell's February production of The Lion in Winter couldn't have been an easy choice for Pat Nesbit, competing against a Katharine Hepburn incarnation that had won the movie star an Academy Award in 1968. Still, Nesbit took and held the stage with... More >>
• Best Supporting Actor
  Tie: Ken Clement in Rabbit Hole at the Mosaic Theatre and in The Faith Healer at Inside Out Theatre Mosaic Theatre
  Ken Clement is a superb actor who can endow big, overwrought roles with surprising subtlety and grace. He does this constantly, but it's rare to see him in a part that flatly demands that subtlety and grace from the get-go. Recently, he's had two. In The Faith Healer, he played Teddy, the... More >>
• Best Supporting Actress (1 Comment)
  Rebecca Simon in A Bright Room Called Day at Florida Atlantic University
  Straddling a fine line between Cyndi Lauper and Johnny Rotten, gleefully decrying the evils of the world like Hannah Arendt screaming on an amphetamine skillet, Rebecca Simon's portrayal of Zillah Katz distilled all the heavy politics of Tony Kushner's anti-fascist dialectic into a punk sneer... More >>
• Best Theater for Drama
  Sol Theatre
  Theater is fun, but theaters usually aren't. Too often, they're viewed as life-support systems for stages — places for an audience to hunker down and passively observe beloved artists at work. Not so at Sol. There's a definite vibe happening, a vaguely grimy DIY aesthetic that spices up the... More >>
• Best Theatrical Design Team
  Mark Pirolo and Florida Stage for Hatchetman
  Hatchetman was a very silly play about a golfing magazine called Putts. The script was fine, but it wasn't the sort of thing people would remember two or three years (or weeks) afterward. The production was another story altogether: inspired acting that treated the script with a lot more respect... More >>
• Best Acting Ensemble
  The Cast of Glengarry Glen Ross at the Mosaic Theatre
  As a play, David Mamet's Glengarry doesn't hit a lot of notes: There's venal greed, mortal greed, lying, anger, and recrimination, and that's about it. Somehow, Mosaic's actors made that small clutch of emotions stand in for — and count for as much as — the whole varied spectrum of... More >>